Posted: 7 Mar 2005, 10:02 am Post subject: If Q Television were to do a trans documentary...

...what would you want to see?

Here's mine:

I want to see a documentary which has just three or four people from really diverse parts of the trans spectrum-- say, a drag king of color, a young gay FTM, a transwoman of color, an older lesbian transwoman and her partner-- and which doesn't pretend that these folks represent all transpeople. They should hand them the camera and some camera operators and say "Here, shoot us some footage. If you need any help or advice we'll be around." Shoot about a week of footage over the course of two months for each of them, and then have them all hang out together and talk about how they want to put the docu together and what parts are most important to keep in, how they want to be represented, etc, and film that. Then edit with the continuous input of the people who are involved in the documentary. There are so many documentaries representing transfolk from an outsider's point of view and almost none, and certainly none available to mainstream audiences, where transfolk get to represent themselves. the way I've suggested doing it it would probably be as long as a miniseries, which would be great for a channel dedicated to queer programming.

I wrote to LOGO with this suggestion and they laughed at me. I want to know if Q TV can do better.

Posted: 7 Mar 2005, 8:06 pm Post subject: Re: If Q Television were to do a trans documentary...

kereth wrote:

...what would you want to see?

Here's mine:

I want to see a documentary which has just three or four people from really diverse parts of the trans spectrum-- say, a drag king of color, a young gay FTM, a transwoman of color, an older lesbian transwoman and her partner-- and which doesn't pretend that these folks represent all transpeople. They should hand them the camera and some camera operators and say "Here, shoot us some footage. If you need any help or advice we'll be around." Shoot about a week of footage over the course of two months for each of them, and then have them all hang out together and talk about how they want to put the docu together and what parts are most important to keep in, how they want to be represented, etc, and film that. Then edit with the continuous input of the people who are involved in the documentary. There are so many documentaries representing transfolk from an outsider's point of view and almost none, and certainly none available to mainstream audiences, where transfolk get to represent themselves. the way I've suggested doing it it would probably be as long as a miniseries, which would be great for a channel dedicated to queer programming.

I wrote to LOGO with this suggestion and they laughed at me. I want to know if Q TV can do better.

Kereth

Though I don't work for QTV, you probably have a better chance with the aforementioned documentary with QTV than you would have with LOGO. I would contact Jackie Enx via their website or call QTV and ask for her or Frank Olsen who is the CEO of the network.